Once Upon a Time in Connecticut

by Caroline Clifford Newton

Lebanon was then on one of the main roads through New England, and many distinguished men stopped there at different times to see the governor. Washington came, and Lafayette, the young French nobleman whom Washington loved almost as a son, and who is, perhaps, “nearer to the hearts of the Americans than any man not of their own people.” Lafayette holds this place in their affections because, before the French Government decided to send help to the colonies, he “came from France of his own accord and brought with him the sympathy of the French people,” among whom also new ideas of liberty were stirring.

“From the moment I first heard of America,” he said, “I began to love her; from the moment I understood that she was struggling for her liberties, I burned to shed my best blood in her cause.”

Lafayette’s countrymen, who spent the winter of 1781 in Lebanon, were the gallant soldiers of France. Their leader, the Duke de Lauzun, was a gay French nobleman, very handsome, very fond of good living, brilliant and witty as well as brave; nobody like him or his men had ever been seen before in Lebanon. The people of that quiet little town opened their eyes in surprise when the dashing French hussars, in their tall black caps and their brilliantly braided jackets, came galloping in over the muddy country roads. Governor Trumbull had made provision for them. Barracks were built for some on a farm which he owned just outside the town, and others camped on the village Green.

With their arrival life in Lebanon changed. At daybreak the French bugles blew the reveille. There were parades and reviews, there were balls and parties. Washington held a review of Lauzun’s Legion when he passed through the place one day in March. The corps was finely equipped. Its horses were good, its men brave and handsome, and their uniforms vivid and trim. The hussars wore sky-blue jackets braided with white, yellow breeches, high boots, and tall caps with a white plume at the side. They made a great impression on the country people, who had seen their own men, dressed in homespun clothes, mount their rough farmhorses and ride away, just as they were, to the war. The duke himself was friendly and pleasant and popular with his new neighbors. He lived in a house lent him by David Trumbull, the governor’s son.

Once, early in the winter, two distinguished visitors from the French army came to see him, the Marquis de Chastellux, who wrote a book of “Travels in North America,” and the Baron de Montesquieu; and he gave a dinner for them to which he invited Governor Trumbull. In the marquis’s book we can read a description of it and of Governor Trumbull as he appeared to these French gentlemen from the Old World.

“On returning from the chase,” says de Chastellux (he had been out hunting squirrels), “I dined at the Duke de Lauzun’s with Governor Trumbull. This good methodical governor is seventy years old. His whole life is consecrated to business, which he passionately loves, whether it is important or not. He has all the simplicity and pedantry of a great magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony.” Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with “formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite.” The French officers must have been surprised; they were not used to simple country manners and to grace before meat on all occasions, but they were too polite and too well trained to laugh. “Twenty amens issued at once from the midst of forty moustaches,” says the marquis, and in spite of the fun he makes of the old Puritan governor’s stiff manners, we feel in reading the story that he fully appreciates his sterling good qualities.

Some of these pleasure-loving French gentlemen met a strange and sad fate, years later, in the terrible days of the French Revolution. The Duke de Lauzun was beheaded in Paris in 1793, his long and adventurous life “ended with a little spurt of blood under the knife of the guillotine”; and Lafayette spent five years in an Austrian prison.

There is another story of old Lebanon which is connected with the visit of the French soldiers. The French commander-in-chief, the Count de Rochambeau, had given to Madam Faith Trumbull, the governor’s wife, a beautiful scarlet cloak, and one Sabbath day she appeared in the governor’s pew in the Lebanon meeting-house wearing the French general’s handsome gift. Now, in those hard times contributions for the army were often collected after service on Sundays, and the people not only gave money, but whatever else they could spare, Indian corn, flax, wood, shoes and stockings, hats and coats. Quietly the governor’s wife rose in her seat and, taking the scarlet cloak from her shoulders, carried it down to the front and laid it with the other gifts. Later, it was cut into narrow bands and used to make red stripes on the soldiers’ uniforms.

All that is left of those stirring times in Lebanon to-day is the little “War Office,”—­restored and kept as a memorial of the Revolution,—­and the mound on the Green where the brick oven stood in which bread was baked for the French soldiers who fought for American independence.